It’s our job to protect the UK’s public from the things that harm them. The problem is that often, large parts of the nearly 70 million people who make up that group seem hell-bent on seeking out the things that cause the most damage, and all the education in the world won’t stop that.
A case in point is illegally imported tobacco, in all its various forms, which continues to form a motherload of work for Trading Standards. It skips past regulation and duty by the container load, with the result that a backdoor dodgy roll-up contains disproportionately high quantities of lead, cadmium, nicotine and carbon monoxide. Bad things, sure, but when you smoke 20 a day anyway, are you really going to listen to someone saying that a 6% increase in these toxins is going to make a big difference? When a pouch comes in at £20 instead of £40, the saving you make is likely to make you temporarily deaf to even the most convincing arguments.
And if the risks are clear with tobacco in its traditional forms, we’re just starting to get to grips with what illegal vapes and snus pose. Both are more complex products, and target a younger audience, for whom peer pressure is often the loudest noise in the room. It’s also understandable that many of those who consume nicotine or tobacco this way look at the huge sums generated by duty and come to the conclusion that the illegal route is sticking it to the man, one puff at a time.
When it comes to these products, I often have to fight the temptation to look at the choices that these consumers make and judge them. Either openly or subconsciously, it’s easy to decide that if people do things which may do them harm, they have in some way opted out of the protection that we are doing our best to provide. After all, the illicit market wouldn’t exist if they hadn’t bought under the counter. ‘Most of them surely know what they’re doing,’ runs the narrative being delivered from the little red man on our shoulder, ‘they’ve only got themselves to blame.’
But the ‘own worst enemy’ approach doesn’t work for me. We know little or nothing about the lives that people lead that result in addiction to these substances, about the cultural dependence and significance of these habits. Society has made these things available legitimately, and has now made them too expensive for much of the demographic which has become dependent on them. What did we imagine would happen?
We can’t change any of this. We can limit availability of illegal product where possible and make clear the risks when we have the opportunity. We can’t save people from themselves. We can only reduce harm by incremental percentage points and know that we have done our bit.
